Longlegs has legs, as Paramount picks up the tab for Nicolas Cage’s next horror movie.
CinemaCon is on right now – the annual expo when studios give exhibitors a look at all the hopefully cool, hopefully lucrative films on their upcoming slate, angling to secure bookings. A lot of projects get announced at CinemaCon, and a lot of new footage gets screened for the first time – expect a massive uptick in trailer releases after.
But it’s a project announcement that concerns us now, with The Hollywood Reporter dropping the news that Paramount is pulling the trigger on a follow up to the 2024 horror hit, Longlegs, from writer and director Osgood Perkins and star Nicolas Cage.
Longlegs was a surprisingly big hit when it dropped a couple years ago, with industry pundits citing the film’s intriguing, slow burn online marketing strategy as a major factor. Maika Monroe starred as low key psychic FBI agent Lee Harker, whose investigations into a string of bizarre murder-suicides lead her to a mysterious serial killer, the Longlegs of the title (Nicolas Cage, naturally).
The film became the highest-grossing independent movie of the last 10 years, so the demand for a sequel is more than understandable. However, whatever we’re getting isn’t a sequel, it’s being stressed, but rather a new story “set in the Longlegs universe”. You know, like how A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, wasn’t a sequel, but rather a new story set in the Elm Street universe. I dunno, I just find it funny how weird people get around words like “sequel” or “remake”.
Since Longlegs, Perkins has given us the much loved Stephen King adaptation, The Monkey, and the less-loved-but-still-pretty-interesting Keeper with Tatiana Maslany, both in 2025. His next film, The Young People, starring Lola Tung, Nico Parker, Tatiana Maslany, Johnny Knoxville, Heather Graham, and Nicole Kidman, is due out later this year.
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